March 2010 Issue

Message & Media : Conversation Killers
Are you ready for a break from reading about social, digital, mobile, online and other media? A colleague who is a social media maven recently reminded me that, "Media is meaningless unless it's delivering a compelling message of personal relevance...

E-commerce Link : Reality Check
You cannot control your customers anymore. Instead, it's time for you to enter "the conversation" or risk becoming irrelevant to them. And when you start conversing, you must be transparent and humanize yourself. It's imperative to assess the sentiment of...

Famous Last Words : Making Sense Out of New Media
As I write this, the media are alive with the great tragedy of the 7.0 earthquake that destroyed much of Haiti. With shaky electricity and phone service in that beleaguered nation, communications are problematical....

Editor’s Notes : Response Is a Two-Way Street
The results of Target Marketing 's fourth annual Media Usage Forecast are in. While offline channels like direct mail and telemarketing still factor significantly into most respondents' plans, the love affair with all things digital grows. New media that cast...

Data Driven : Multichannel Challenges
Measuring the impact of marketing campaigns has become both complicated and enhanced in a multichannel world. Traditional methods of looking at cause and effect relationships between a set of activities and a set of behaviors no longer give marketers a...

Nuts & Bolts - Book Club : Retention Is the New Acquisition
The traditional marketing funnel is outdated, lopsided and broken, with its gaping mouth acquiring many, sometimes not qualified, customers but retaining few. "What happens to the chosen few who make it through to the other end of the funnel? They...

Database : Data Prep
While 94 percent of surveyed marketers agree that personalized marketing would result in better performance, only 16 percent of best-in-class companies actually execute one-to-one direct marketing campaigns, according to Aberdeen Group. A fundamental reason for the low rate of implementation...

B-to-B : When Small Is Big
The small and medium business (SMB) market is huge. Almost all of the businesses in the U.S. are in it! But while the opportunity is unlimited, SMB firms also are volatile, nomadic and subject to varied definitions. Thus, our first...

Cover Story : Media Usage Forecast 2010
If flat is the new up, then those economists and industry analysts predicting that we're seeing the first indicators of a slow recovery are right on the money....

Brand : Ready, Set, Listen!
As fast-paced professionals running departments or full-fledged businesses—managing people and projects and schedules and products—listening can sometimes fall off our to-do lists. We don't have time to really pause and listen well. While we may see the value in making...